I'm in a quandary. I don't know if you remember me talking about our friend, Earthine, who cut and trimmed our lawn pretty regularly over the last few years. Once we started going through all the construction, not to mention how he cut down all of my plants, we decided we would take care of our lawn ourselves once all the construction work finished.

So here we are eight months later with the task at hand. The lawn is getting quite tall and scraggly and is begging to be cut. But our electric mower died and all we have left is a hand trimmer. My dad graciously offered to give me his mower since he now has someone to care for his property, but it's gas and I have a problem with that.

Gas mowers are not only noisy, they pollute the air. Additionally, with our ever-increasing reliance on petroleum products it gets costly to maintain and supports some bad politics. Electric mowers are quieter, but you have to have a really long cord or several electrical plugs close by. There are battery-powered varieties as well, but if you forget to charge the thing...well, you know the rest of the story. Finally, there are manual push mowers. That would normally be my first choice, but the size of our new yard is a lot bigger than the previous one. Once I get all my gardens built out, that won't be a problem because I plan to have only a few grass paths and a place for our boys to run on. But in the meantime, there's a yard full of tall grass and weeds that needs to be cut!

So, the final choice is to take the free mower from my dad and use it until the gardens are completed. The good news is that this will spur me to reduce the size of the lawn pretty quickly or before the end of the year, whichever comes first. Of course the bad news is that as much as I would love to be out in the gardens everyday, it just isn't feasible so the timing will probably be later than sooner. I'll do the best I can and plan to have that manual mower for next year. Happy Gardening.